Excerpt:

>US aerospace company Boeing said it has held discussions with Emirates officials about the UAE providing an airlock module on the Lunar Gateway.

>This is an airtight room that astronauts would use to enter and exit the space station.

>John Mulholland, vice president and International Space Station programme manager at Boeing, told The National that the company was “actively working” with the UAE on the concept and design.

>The Lunar Gateway falls under Nasa’s Artemis programme, which aims to put humans back on the Moon’s surface this decade.

>“One of the things that the UAE is working on is the evaluation of whether they are going to put up an airlock module on the Gateway, which would be outstanding,” said Mr Mulholland at the Abu Dhabi Space Debate.

> 

>There is no agreement that has been signed between the UAE and Boeing yet on the project, and Mr Mulholland said that the country was still evaluating.

>However, Sean Fuller, international partner manager on the Gateway programme, said on Monday that an announcement would be made in a couple of months.

>He said that Nasa was in “active negotiations” with a potential new partner to contribute to an airlock module, according to a tweet by space journalist Jeff Foust.

>The UAE has been exploring ways of becoming involved in the Artemis programme.

>The Emirates is one of the signatories of the Artemis Accords, a set of US-led international agreements that outline the responsible exploration of the Moon and beyond.

Sarwat Nasir, 13 December 2022, The National (International Media Investments)

>DoomGoober

>Odd that the article says propioception is unconscious. Other papers say there are both conscious and unconscious forms of proprioception:

>https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18851800/

>J Surg Orthop Adv. 2008 Fall.

An excerpt from Somatosensory 1, last revised December 2013:

>UNCONSCIOUS "PROPRIOCEPTION":

>The sensory information discussed above, which is useful for consciousness, is also useful for unconscious functional control of movement. Therefore:

>• The primary afferent axon, upon entering the spinal cord, will have branches (collaterals) to share the sensory signal with "local reflex" neurons, and

>• To share the signal with the cerebellum (works at unconscious level) by a synapse with spinal cord neurons, whose axons form spinocerebellar tracts.

>http://anat403.class.uic.edu/Lectures/lecture6_09.htm

Excerpt:

>Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch: We’re all familiar with the five senses that allow us to experience our surroundings.

>Equally important but much less well known is the sixth sense: “Its job is to collect information from the muscles and joints about our movements, our posture and our position in space, and then pass that on to our central nervous system”, says Dr. Niccolò Zampieri, head of the Development and Function of Neural Circuits Lab at the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin.

>“This sense, known as proprioception, is what allows the central nervous system to send the right signals through motor neurons to muscles so that we can perform a specific movement.”

> 

>The pSN cell bodies are located in the dorsal root ganglia of the spinal cord. They are connected via long nerve fibers to the muscle spindles and Golgi tendon organs that constantly register stretch and tension in every muscle of the body. The pSN send this information to the central nervous system, where it is used to control motor neuron activity so that we can perform movements.

>Using single-cell sequencing, the team investigated which genes in the pSN of the abdominal, back and leg muscles are read and translated into RNA. “And we did find characteristic genes for the pSN connected to each muscle group,” says Dietrich. “We also showed that these genes are already active at the embryonic stage and remain active for at least a while after birth.”

>Dietrich explains that this means there are fixed genetic programs that decide whether a proprioceptor will innervate the abdominal, back or limb muscles.

Nature Communications, 2022. DOI 10.1038/s41467-022-34589-8

Excerpt:

>Rishi Sunak is set to announce a collaboration between the UK, Italy and Japan to develop a new fighter jet that uses artificial intelligence.

>The nations will develop a next generation fighter - due to enter service in the mid-2030s - that will eventually replace the Typhoon jet.

>It is hoped the new Tempest jet will carry the latest weapons.

>But building such a complex aircraft is extremely expensive - developing the F35 jet was the most expensive programme ever undertaken by the Pentagon - so Britain has been looking for partners.

>Italy was already on board, and the addition of Japan is a significant move - at a time when Britain is building closer ties with allies in the Indo-Pacific region worried about a more assertive China.

>Other countries could still join the programme. France, Germany and Spain are already working together on their own separate design - as is the United States.

Jonathan Beale, 9 December 2022.

Further reading:

>The Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) is a new partnership and ambitious endeavour between the UK, Japan and Italy to deliver the next generation of combat air fighter jets.

>Due to take to the skies by 2035, the ambition is for this to be a next-generation jet enhanced by a network of capabilities such as uncrewed aircraft, advanced sensors, cutting-edge weapons and innovative data systems.

>The combat aircraft developed through GCAP is also expected to be compatible with other NATO partners’ fighter jets.

PM announces new international coalition to develop the next generation of combat aircraft, 9 December 2022, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-announces-new-international-coalition-to-develop-the-next-generation-of-combat-aircraft

Louise Lerner, 5 December 2022.

Excerpt:

>For a long time, we didn’t know very much about the weather in the Southern Hemisphere: most of the ways we observe weather are land-based, and the Southern Hemisphere has much more ocean than the Northern Hemisphere does.

>But with the advent of satellite-based global observing in the 1980s, we could quantify just how extreme the difference was. The Southern Hemisphere has a stronger jet stream and more intense weather events.

>[The authors] used a numerical model of Earth’s climate built on the laws of physics that reproduced the observations. Then they removed different variables one at a time, and quantified each one’s impact on storminess.

> 

>The first variable they tested was topography. Large mountain ranges disrupt air flow in a way that reduces storms, and there are more mountain ranges in the Northern Hemisphere.

>The other half had to do with ocean circulation. Water moves around the globe like a very slow but powerful conveyor belt: it sinks in the Arctic, travels along the bottom of the ocean, rises near Antarctica and then flows up near the surface, carrying energy with it. This creates an energy difference between the two hemispheres.

>The Southern Hemisphere storminess changes were connected to changes in the ocean. They found a similar ocean influence is occurring in the Northern Hemisphere, but its effect is canceled out by the absorption of sunlight in the Northern Hemisphere due to the loss of sea ice and snow.

>The scientists checked and found that models used to forecast climate change as part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report were showing the same signals—increasing storminess in the Southern Hemisphere and negligible changes in the Northern—which serves as an important independent check on the accuracy of these models.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022. DOI 10.1073/pnas.2123512119

November 28, 2022.

>Whatcheeria was a six-foot-long lake-dwelling creature with a salamander-like body and a long, narrow head; its fossils were discovered in a limestone quarry near the town of What Cheer, Iowa.

>There are around 350 Whatcheeria specimens, ranging from single bones to complete skeletons, that have been unearthed, and every last one of them resides in the Field Museum’s collections.

>In a new study in Communications Biology, these specimens helped reveal how Whatcheeria grew big enough to menace its fishy prey: instead of growing “slow and steady” the way that many modern reptiles and amphibians do, it grew rapidly in its youth.

>Whatcheeria was a top predator. Bony grooves in its skull for sensory organs shared by fish and aquatic amphibians reveal that it lived underwater, and its sturdy leg bones could have helped it hunker down in one spot and wait for prey to swim by.

>While Whatcheeria looks like a giant salamander, it isn’t one-- it’s a “stem tetrapod,” an early four-legged critter that’s part of the lineage that eventually evolved into the four-limbed animals alive today.

> 

>“Whatcheeria is more closely related to living tetrapods like amphibians and reptiles and mammals than it is to anything else, but it falls outside of those modern groups,” says Ken Angielczyk, a curator at the Field Museum and co-author of the study. “That means that it can help us learn about how tetrapods, including us, evolved.”

>To see how Whatcheeria grew, [Ben Otoo, co-author; PhD student at the University of Chicago] and Angielczyk offered up thigh bones from nine Whatcheeria individuals ranging from juvenile to adult.

>[Lead author Megan Whitney] and her advisor, Harvard University’s Stephanie Pierce, took thin slices of bone and examined them under a microscope. When an animal is growing, it creates new layers of bone every growing season, says Otoo.

>In addition to helping give us a better sense of the evolutionary pressures on early tetrapods, the researchers say the findings are a reminder that evolution isn’t a neat stepwise process: it’s a series of experiments.

Communications Biology, 2022. DOI 10.1038/s42003-022-04079-0

Excerpt:

>In a new study published today [5 December 2022] in the European Geosciences Union journal The Cryosphere, an international team of scientists synthesized multisource data from 2001 to 2018 to explore the spatiotemporal variations of both surface and basal melt/freeze onsets and uncover the mechanism behind them.

>These findings could improve our understanding of changes in the atmosphere–ice–ocean system and the mass balance of sea ice in a changing Arctic.

>“Thinner ice thickness and thinner snow cover favors earlier basal freeze onset. The ocean plays a cross-seasonal role in regulating the growth or decay of sea ice,” explains lead author Long Lin from the Polar Research Institute of China.

> 

>The researchers found that the overall average basal freeze onset of Arctic multiyear ice was almost 3 months later than the surface.

>According to Lin, although thinner ice generally experiences a longer freezing season, the total ice growth still cannot offset the sea ice loss in summer.

>“From another point of view, the self-regulation of the Arctic sea ice-ocean system will delay the loss of Arctic sea ice.”

>These results present the first complete picture of Arctic sea ice freeze-thaw cycle, and its coupling with atmosphere atop and ocean underlying.

>It also highlights the importance of synchronous comprehensive monitoring of air-ice-ocean system, which helps explain the physical nature of the coupling process.

The Cryosphere, 2022. DOI 10.5194/tc-16-4779-2022

Tim Stephens, 8 July 2022.

Excerpt:

>The reaction of narwhals to the loud noise from seismic air guns used in oil exploration involves a disruption of the normal physiological response to intense exercise as the animals try to escape the noise. The overall effect is a large increase in the energetic cost of diving while a paradoxically reduced heart rate alters the circulation of blood and oxygen.

>“They’re swimming as hard as they can to get away, and yet their heart rate is not increasing—we think because of a fear response. This affects how much blood and oxygen can circulate, and that’s going to be problematic,” said Terrie Williams, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz who led the new study.

>Published July 8 in the Journal of Functional Ecology, the study provides the first look at the impact of seismic noise on the physiological responses of a deep-diving cetacean.

> 

>According to Williams, the combination of extremely low heart rates, increased heart rate variability, and high-intensity exercise during deep dives presents a significant physiological challenge for narwhals, especially if the disruptions are prolonged as would be likely during extended oil exploration activities.

>Narwhals live year-round in high Arctic waters where sea ice has helped isolate them from disturbance by humans for millions of years.

>But declines in polar sea ice are making the region more accessible to shipping, natural resource exploration, and other human activities.

Journal of Functional Ecology, 2022. DOI: 10.1111/1365-2435.14119

Excerpt:

>NASA will provide live coverage of the first spacewalk beginning at 6 a.m. EST on Saturday, Dec. 3 on NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website. The spacewalk is scheduled to begin at 7:25 a.m. and last about seven hours.

>NASA astronauts Josh Cassada and Frank Rubio will exit the station’s Quest airlock to install an International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array (iROSA) to augment power generation for the 3A power channel on the station’s starboard truss structure.

>This spacewalking task will restore redundancy for affected station systems following unexpected tripping observed on the 1B channel Nov. 26. By isolating a section of the impacted array, which was one of several damaged strings, the goal is to restore 75% of the array’s functionality.

>Cassada and Rubio are scheduled to conduct the next U.S. spacewalk Dec.19, this time to install an iROSA on the 4A power channel on the port truss.

Credits: NASA; editing by Roxana Bardan.

Becky Ferreira, 1 December 2022.

Excerpt:

>A long time ago, a huge asteroid struck a watery planet in our solar system, sparking an enormous megatsunami that reached hundreds of feet into the air and left permanent traces on the landscape.

>You might be picturing the famous space rock that wiped out the dinosaurs on Earth, but scientists have now confirmed that the same story played out on Mars some 3.4 billion years ago, at a time when Mars hosted a huge ocean that might have hosted microbial life.

>After decades of speculation about this ancient extraterrestrial impact and megatsunami, researchers led by Alexis Rodriguez, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, have pinpointed the likely spot, called Pohl crater, where the asteroid collided with the Martian ocean at roughly 24,000 miles per hour.

>This key discovery suggests that Pohl crater, and its surrounding regions, could be important targets in the search for alien life, as they may bear “information on how the ocean’s habitability and possible life evolved,” according to a study published in Scientific Reports on Thursday.

>The team was also able to reconstruct some of the mind-boggling effects of this ancient impact and the subsequent megatsunami, which may have produced 800-foot-high waves.

> 

Alexis Rodriguez, in a call with Vice:

>“I think that we have two distinct and very interesting astrobiological targets that come out of this study,” Rodriguez said. “The first one is obviously the Viking 1 landing site because we have this controversy so it would be good to be able to resolve it.” The second, he added, are the remains of mud volcanoes in this huge dried-up ocean basin.

>“There is a possibility that this mud volcanism was driven by the release of seawater trapped in the sediments, or gasses connected to the evaporation of seawater, and obviously, that has very interesting astrobiological implications,” he concluded. “So, there are lots of targets to understand the evolution of the ocean of Mars, its potential biochemistry, and the way that the environment changed within the ocean over time.”

Scientific Reports, 2022. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-18082-2

Excerpt:

>NASA's Orion spacecraft reached the farthest outbound point in its journey from Earth on Monday, a distance of more than 430,000 km from humanity's home world.

>This is nearly double the distance between Earth and the Moon and is farther than the Apollo capsule traveled during NASA's lunar missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

>From this vantage point, on Monday, a camera attached to the solar panels on board Orion's service module snapped photos of the Moon and, just beyond, the Earth. These were lovely, lonely, and evocative images.

>"The imagery was crazy," said the Artemis I mission's lead flight director, Rick LaBrode. "It’s really hard to articulate what the feeling is. It’s really amazing to be here, and see that."

> 

>LaBrode was speaking during a news conference at Johnson Space Center in Houston, where he and other NASA officials provided an update on the progress of the mission to test out the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft.

>This uncrewed test flight is a precursor to crewed missions later this decade, including a lunar landing on the Artemis III mission.

>After it completed a successful launch, mission manager Mike Sarafin said the agency now has full confidence in the Space Launch System rocket. "The rocket is proven," he said.

> 

>Orion still has work to do, of course. Its mission will not be complete until the spacecraft maneuvers back around the Moon, returns to Earth, survives reentry into the atmosphere, splashes down into the ocean, and is recovered off the coast near San Diego, California. That is scheduled to occur on December 11.

>Understandably, NASA's engineers are thrilled by the performance of Artemis I so far. It was a long, bumpy, and costly development path to reach this mission with the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft.

>But once the vehicles began flying, their performance has met every expectation and hope of the space agency, increasing confidence in the future of the Artemis program to explore the Moon.

Eric Berger, November 29, 2022.

Excerpt:

>Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin recently received expanded funding from the National Science Foundation to continue their work studying human-robot interactions.

>To do this, the team plans to release four-legged robots around the university campus and collect data on what it finds. The project will begin in 2023 and run for five years.

>“When we deploy robots in the real world, it's not just a technical problem, it's actually a socio-technical problem,” Joydeep Biswas, assistant professor of computer science in the College of Natural Sciences and member of the research team, told Ars.

>The research team will set up a network, and UT Austin community members—students, staff, et cetera—will be able to use an app on their smartphones to deliver goods like hand wipes and sanitizer.

> 

>While deployed, the robots will inevitably run into (possibly literally) pedestrians, cyclists, scooter riders, and larger vehicles. The researchers will watch and study the interactions between these mobile humans and machines.

>The robots will be monitored either in-person or remotely so the researchers can collect data about how the robots interact with the humans they encounter and stop the robots if they act in undesirable ways.

>The team will also create a research database to collect the data from the study and investigate how we can deploy autonomous robots in human environments, “not just for five minutes or for an hour, but for years at a time,” Biswas said.

Doug Johnson for Ars Technica, 12 November 2022.

27 October 2022.

Excerpt:

>The study was carried out during the 2018-2019 Five Deeps Expedition, the first manned descent with the submersible DSV Limiting Factor to the deepest point of each of the world’s five oceans, and focused on the amphipod Bathycallisoma schellenbergi which was unexpectedly found in the traps of nearly every trench of hadal depth (between six and 11 kms).

>“We finally had a global specimen collection to test questions that have been around since the 1950s. This led us to question this paradox and wonder if maybe we were looking at multiple but very similar-looking species.” [said co-author Professor Alan Jamieson].

>The study’s first author, Postdoctoral Scholar at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Johanna Weston, said scientists used a short section of DNA to test if all the populations were the same species.

>“The amphipods at the Atacama Trench are likely a new and undescribed species that is very closely related.”

> 

>“We found that overall populations were not genetically mixed between trenches, indicating they were highly restricted to the trench they were collected from,” Dr Weston said.

>“We did find evidence of limited interbreeding between two closely located and connected trenches, the Kermadec and Tonga trenches, which are separated by just 1000km, so surmised some amphipods could have swum across what are relatively shallow depths.”

>Professor Jamieson said the study advanced the field of hadal science, particularly at the intersection of evolutionary and geologic history, providing evidence to show that each of the hadal areas acted like an island-like habitat with populations on separate evolutionary trajectories.

Science Advances, DOI 10.1126/sciadv.abo6672

From a profile by the Oregon Historical Society:

>Matsuoka was a Japanese diplomat who played a key role in Japan’s foreign relations from the 1900s through the early 1940s. He also happened to have a strong connection to the state of Oregon.

>Matsuoka would go on to have a long, controversial diplomatic career during one of the most tumultuous periods in the history of Japanese foreign relations. He believed that Japan, like the other island empire, Great Britain, was destined to expand outward. “Both must be colonial empires,” he told one reporter, “both must be maritime and naval powers.”

>In 1930, Matsuoka was elected to the Japanese parliament. Three years later he pulled Japan out of the League of Nations while serving as his nation’s chief delegate after the League condemned Japan’s invasion of Manchuria. He went on to serve as foreign minister from 1940-1941, during which time he signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy.

Yosuke Matsuoka, https://www.oregonhistoryproject.org/articles/historical-records/yosuke-matsuoka/

Excerpt:

A Japanese foreign minister met Pope Pius XII and his secretary of state during World War II to seek mediation in a desperate bid to avert war with the United States, eight months before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Vatican documents recently seen by Kyodo News show.

Yosuke Matsuoka wanted the Holy See to speak to President Franklin Roosevelt to try to prevent "a war of mutual destruction," telling Cardinal Luigi Maglione that Tokyo also wanted a cease-fire with China after more than three years of war, according to a summary by the cardinal's office of a meeting on April 2, 1941, between the two.

[Matsuoka] said that the U.S. leader would be able to bring peace to the Far East by mediating on Japan's behalf with Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, according to the documents.

Matsuoka held talks with the pope before he met with the cardinal but what the pope said during the discussions remains unknown to the public.

 

Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, leading the United States to declare war against the country the next day and formally enter the conflict.

After his country's surrender in 1945, Matsuoka was arrested and indicted as a Class-A war criminal by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East but died of illness in 1946 before the trial's completion.

According to historian and author Satoshi Hattori, Matsuoka began exploring ways to save Tokyo's relationship with the United States around December 1940 after realizing that the Japanese southward military advance would fail.

The document is a demonstration of Matsuoka's last-minute attempts to prevent war with the United States by using every possible channel, he said.

Kyodo News, 27 November 2022.

Updated November 23, 2022.

>NASA is seeking public comments on a draft environmental impact statement for the agency’s Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign. Comments are due by Monday, Dec. 19.

>NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) are planning to use robotic Mars orbiter and lander missions launched in 2027 and 2028 to retrieve samples of rocks and atmosphere being gathered by NASA’s Perseverance rover and return them to Earth.

>Comments can be submitted online, through the mail, or through participation in a series of virtual and in-person meetings. Advanced registration for meeting options, including in-person meetings in Utah, is not required.

> 

>Two virtual meetings to discuss the Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement for the campaign will take place on Wednesday, Nov. 30.

>The in-person meetings will be held at 6 p.m. MST on Tuesday, Dec. 6, at the Wendover Community Center, 112 E Moriah Avenue, Wendover, Utah, and on Wednesday, Dec. 7, at the Clark Planetarium, 110 S 400 W, Salt Lake City, Utah.

> 

>In addition to receiving comments during the public meetings, comments may be sent to NASA in the following ways:

>Federal e-Rulemaking Portal: Follow the online instructions for submitting comments and include Docket No. NASA-2022-0002. Please note that NASA will post all comments online without changes, including any personal information provided.

>By mail to Steve Slaten, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, M/S: 180-801, Pasadena, CA 91109–8099

>Additional information on the agency’s National Environmental Policy Act process [https://www.nasa.gov/agency/nepa/] and the proposed campaign [https://mars.nasa.gov/msr/] is available online.

RELEASE 22-121

David Alire Garcia, updated November 25, 2022 00:00 UTC.

Excerpt:

>Sealed in stone boxes five centuries ago at the foot of the temple, the contents of one box found in the exact center of what was a ceremonial circular stage has shattered records for the number of sea offerings from both the Pacific Ocean and off Mexico's Gulf Coast, including more than 165 once-bright-red starfish and upwards of 180 complete coral branches.

>Archeologists believe Aztec priests carefully layered these offerings in the box within the elevated platform for a ceremony likely attended by thousands of rapt spectators amid the thunder-clap of drums.

> 

>"Pure imperial propaganda," Leonardo Lopez Lujan, lead archeologist at the Proyecto Templo Mayor of Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), which is overseeing the dig, said of the likely spectacle.

>In the same box, archeologists previously found a sacrificed jaguar dressed like a warrior associated with the Aztec patron Huitzilopochtli, the war and sun god, before the COVID-19 pandemic forced a more than two-year pause on excavations.

> 

>Previously unreported details include last month's discovery of a sacrificed eagle held in the clutches of the jaguar, along with miniature wooden spears and a reed shield found next to the west-facing feline, which had copper bells tied around its ankles.

>The half-excavated rectangular box, dating to the reign of the Aztec's greatest emperor Ahuitzotl who ruled from 1486 to 1502, now shows a mysterious bulge in the middle under the jaguar's skeleton, indicating something solid below.

>Besides the central offering containing the jaguar, two additional boxes were recently identified adjacent to it, with both set to be opened in the next few weeks.

Reuters

>Lark_Iron_Cloud

>There's an implied "and" in that comma. OP titled it like a newspaper headline.

Title is a facsimile of the news wire headline, in The Cyprus Mail.

November 24, 2022.

>A year-long study of the drainage system under the Colosseum has unearthed fragments of the bones of bears and big cats that were probably used to fight or as prey in hunting games in the ancient Roman arena, archaeologists said on Thursday.

>Other discoveries include more than 50 bronze coins from the late Roman period as well as a silver coin from around 170-171 AD to commemorate 10 years of rule of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, they added in a statement.

>Seeds from fruits such as figs, grapes and melons as well as traces of olives and nuts — thought to indicate what spectators snacked on during shows — were also recovered from the 2,000-year-old stone amphitheatre.

>The study, which began in January, involved the clearance of around 70 metres of drains and sewers under the Colosseum and is seen as shedding light on its later years before it fell into disuse around 523 AD.

Reuters via The Cyprus Mail

Ceren Kabukcu, 23 November 2022.

>My team’s analysis of the oldest charred food remains ever found show that jazzing up your dinner is a human habit dating back at least 70,000 years.

>Imagine ancient people sharing a meal. You would be forgiven for picturing people tearing into raw ingredients or maybe roasting meat over a fire as that is the stereotype.

>But our new study showed both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens had complex diets involving several steps of preparation, and took effort with seasoning and using plants with bitter and sharp flavours.

>This degree of culinary complexity has never been documented before for Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers.

> 

>We examined food remains from two late Paleolithic sites, which cover a span of nearly 60,000 years, to look at the diets of early hunter gatherers. Our evidence is based on fragments of prepared plant foods (think burnt pieces of bread, patties and porridge lumps) found in two caves.

>At both sites, we often found ground or pounded pulse seeds such as bitter vetch (Vicia ervilia), grass pea (Lathyrus spp) and wild pea (Pisum spp).

>The people who lived in these caves added the seeds to a mixture that was heated up with water during grinding, pounding or mashing of soaked seeds.

Antiquity, DOI 10.15184/aqy.2022.143

Excerpt:

>The study was inspired by the Gough Map, the earliest surviving map of Great Britain, perhaps with its origins in the thirteenth century, which is held in the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

>The map depicts two islands in Cardigan Bay in west Wales, which no longer exist. Each of them is depicted about one quarter of the size of the island of Anglesey in north Wales. One is between Aberystwyth and Aberdovey and the other between there and Barmouth to the north.

> 

>The research was undertaken by Simon Haslett, Honorary Professor of Physical Geography at Swansea University and David Willis, Jesus Professor of Celtic at the University of Oxford.

>Their study investigates historical sources and geological evidence from the coastline and the seabed.

>It proposes a model for how the coast has evolved since the last ice age around 10,000 years ago, which provides a possible explanation for the ‘lost’ islands.

>They suggest that the islands could be the remnants of a low-lying landscape underlain by soft glacial deposits laid down during the last ice age. Since then, forces of erosion have worn away the land, reducing it to islands, before these too were worn away and disappearing by the sixteenth century.

^Haslett, ^S. ^K., ^& ^Willis, ^D. ^(2022). ^The ^‘lost’ ^islands ^of ^Cardigan ^Bay, ^Wales, ^UK: ^insights ^into ^the ^post-glacial ^evolution ^of ^some ^Celtic ^coasts ^of ^northwest ^Europe. ^Atlantic ^Geoscience, ^58, ^131–146. ^https://doi.org/10.4138/atlgeo.2022.005

Excerpt:

>It is easy to forget the unprecedented nature of Trypillia megasites. During the 5th and 4th millennia BC in Eurasia, Trypillia megasites were unique in size and scale.

>Nowhere else on the planet in 4200 BC compared to the megasite of Vesely Kut, in south-central Ukraine, covering an area of 150 ha.

>While major parts of the megasite plans have been produced at Taljanki and Majdanetske, the Nebelivka Project has produced the only complete megasite plan so far, with a site area of 238 ha inside a shallow perimeter ditch.

>The characterization of the category ‘urban’ in the Trypillian context in general, and Nebelivka in particular, has nine constituents — the territory to which a site is central, site size, population numbers, population heterogeneity, the concentration of skilled labour and management, the built environment and formalized spaces with special functions, the scale of subsistence, the potential to be a node and re-distribution centre in a wide-reaching exchange network and the overall social structure.

> 

>The social, economic and personal implications of living on a small 4.5 ha and the rare >150 ha sites are so different that there was no possibility that the Nebelivka megasite was simply a very large example of a typical small rural settlement.

>It is only in the last 10 years that the significance of a certain class of sites has finally been recognized.

>In contrast to the classic high-density cities such as London, Paris and Berlin, low-density urban sites displayed variable population densities across their much larger area.

>Low-density urbanism was initially recognised by Roland Fletcher and is now an acknowledged alternative trajectory of urban development in most regions in the world.

Bisserka Gaydarska and John Chapman, 30 November 2020.

21 November 2022 19:03 UTC.

>US soccer journalist Grant Wahl says he was detained by security staff after he wore a rainbow shirt to USA’s World Cup opener against Wales.

>Wahl, who works for CBS Sports and writes a popular Substack column, wore the shirt as a show of solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community to the game at Qatar’s Ahmad bin Ali Stadium. Homosexuality is illegal in Qatar.

>However, he said a security guard told him the shirt was not allowed. Wahl said his phone was “forcibly ripped” from his hands by a guard as he tweeted about the incident.

>He said he was then detained for 25 minutes and told to remove his shirt, which a member of security staff said was “political”. He was also asked if he was from the UK.

>Wahl says he told a New York Times journalist who was passing by what had happened and he was detained too before being let go shortly afterwards.

>Wahl said he was subsequently allowed to wear the shirt in the stadium.

The Guardian

November 18, 2022.

Excerpt:

>After an extremely wet October, southeast Australia continued to see heavy rainfall in November 2022. With soils already saturated and dams full, the latest storms have added to ongoing flooding across New South Wales and Victoria.

>Widespread flooding is visible in this false-color image (right) acquired on November 18, 2022, with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite.

>Water appears light to dark blue. Vegetation is green and bare land is brown. For comparison, the MODIS image from the Aqua satellite (left) shows the same area on June 28, 2022, prior to the excessive rainfall.

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>Water that seeps deep into the soil can influence groundwater levels for months. The map above depicts shallow groundwater storage in Australia from November 11–14, 2022, as measured by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) satellites.

>The colors depict the wetness percentile; that is, how the levels of groundwater compare to long-term records (1948–2012). Blue areas have more abundant water than usual, and orange and red areas have less.

>The extent to which such rainfall affects the groundwater level varies by location and depends on a range of factors such as soil type, aquifer depth, and vegetation. Time is also a factor, as rainfall accumulations from months past can influence current groundwater levels.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview and GRACE data from the National Drought Mitigation Center. Story by Kathryn Hansen.

Excerpt:

>Major players in the semiconductor supply chain in East Asia appear to be seeing it as inevitable for them to decouple with China in advanced industries involving sensitive technology, given concerns about the rapid pace of Beijing's military modernization.

>The United States is taking the lead in building a "Chip 4" alliance with Taiwan, South Korea and Japan for increased economic security over a possible global chip crunch in the event of a contingency between Taiwan and China.

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>Mariko Togashi, a research fellow for Japanese security and defense policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said in an interview that a complete decoupling with China is unlikely, but selective decoupling in certain areas involving sensitive technology, something like precision-guided strikes, will progress.

>Togashi said it is very costly -- and impossible in many cases -- to build a completely self-reliant supply chain, so like-minded nations must be included in the circle.

>Such efforts have been under way through the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, a U.S.-led initiative that seeks to build resilient supply chains in the Indo-Pacific.

>The 14-member IPEF, also involving Japan, Australia, South Korea and India -- but not China -- will start formal negotiations in December.

Takaki Tominaga for Kyodo, 20 November 2022 09:10 JST.